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Hi, Thanks for the thoughtful response. Disclaimer: I work at scite. I want to clarify one point in your comment because I know a lot of people read HN comme

Hi, Thanks for the thoughtful response. Disclaimer: I work at scite. I want to clarify one point in your comment because I know a lot of people read HN comments before clicking through: we do NOT offer AI summaries! scite is fundamentally built on the idea that not all citations are equal. We offer disambiguation into citations by extracting the in-text contexts when citations happen between two papers. With that, you can qualitatively see how a paper has been cited by others by seeing the citation contexts from each citing paper. As someone who used to be in research before at the National Cancer Institute, I certainly agree that scientists who are advanced in their field should know the literature inside out. But the utility of scite is I think quite a bit more than that: - If you're an expert scientist, you can configure alerts to know when new citations happen to papers that you care about (e.g. ones you published, or that are important in your field, etc). Except unlike Google Scholar alerts and such, you can now immediately see the citation contexts (as opposed to opening up each paper, and trying to locate the reference(s) and the in-text citations). - If you're a student or an experienced researcher trying to ramp up in a new field (which is increasingly important given how interdisciplinary science is these days), this is a useful tool in your arsenal to digest and discover new papers. - That last comment also applies if you are in the industry! e.g. someone in pharma doing drug discovery or evaluation and you're working on different drugs every <X> months. We do have a preprint we published if you'd like to read more about how scite works: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.15.435418v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.15.435418v1 I hope that was clear. I'm happy to answer any other questions. I'll try to come back and check periodically. - Ashish

rmbyrro 5y ago
@sleepingsoul , how good is your database? Just tried a random paper I've read recently (DOI 10.1109/32.748920). It shows "no citations" in Scite, but Google Scholar shows "Cited by 1180": https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9052935302971671123&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9052935302971671123...
- sleepingsoul 5y ago
  Hi there, Well, that's a tricky question to answer! :) At the moment we use DOIs to link papers / citations, and get our information on DOIs from crossref (https://www.crossref.org/ https://www.crossref.org/). So every DOI there is also in our system (and any citation coming from a source without a DOI currently won't be picked up). From crossref we also have metadata on which publications a given paper references, so we can always show information on how many publications cite a given paper ("traditional citations"). As for our database of Smart Citations (the extracted in-text citation statements) -- the answer is that it depends on our ability to access full-text articles to actually do the citation statement extraction. We're constantly growing in this area through new indexing agreements with publishers and so on. To your specific question about that DOI, here is the corresponding scite report for that paper: https://scite.ai/reports/a-unified-framework-for-coupling-dZAL2j https://scite.ai/reports/a-unified-framework-for-coupling-dZ... I see that we identified 371 distinct citing publications (and extracted 374 in-text citation statements from those publications). Can you let me know where you saw it say "no citations"? That sounds like a bug... I'll take a look. You can email me here: ashish@scite.ai - Ashish
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    Thanks! Weird, I searched for that DOI moments before and it showed this result: "This publication either has no citations yet, or we are still processing them" Let me look into others
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    I think you have an issue in your UI, or I don't understand how it's supposed to be used When I have the results from an article in my screen and use the top search to find another, it only updates the upper part of the page with the paper title, not the stats and summary below it I had searched for an article before that had no citations. That's why I continued to see "no citations" when I searched for the DOI I shared...
    - sleepingsoul 5y ago
      Hi, Thanks for that description, I managed to reproduce this and it is our fault not yours. You are using it correctly. We'll get it fixed ASAP! EDIT: Fixed now :)
uniqueuid 5y ago
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I agree that those use cases are definitely valid. And I would also say that research is a technologically underdeveloped space. So any innovation here is great and will definitely help people! The only worry I have (from past experience) is that easy tools have a differential impact: That they facilitate bad research more than they facilitate sound research. My perception as a scientist is that we primarily need to address actively harmful science (as in: spurious results, p-hacking). Fostering more science, on the other hand, is definitely a second or even third priority.
- sleepingsoul 5y ago
  Yep, I agree. I would like to point out though that one of our aims with this is to buffer against that bad research you mention. Along with our extraction of citation statements, we have a deep learning model that classifies each statement as "supporting", "contrasting", or "mentioning" of the claims made in the original paper. Indeed there is a lot of nuance here, and we've tried to address this in a number of ways (including a manual flag process for review where someone believes it is incorrectly labeled), and we're constantly improving in this area. In general we would expect that research that is not sound will receive more contrasting citations rather than supporting citations because their findings won't be as well supported by future research. I should say explicitly that a "contrasting" citation is not a bad thing per se, especially given the nature of scientific discovery. But a study that was published through p-hacking whose findings are not reproducible should be easier to discern through subsequent contrasting citations. In today's world, all we might know is that it was cited a bunch, with the nuance buried underneath. - Ashish

rmbyrro 5y ago

@sleepingsoul , how good is your database? Just tried a random paper I've read recently (DOI 10.1109/32.748920). It shows "no citations" in Scite, but Google Scholar shows "Cited by 1180": https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9052935302971671123&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9052935302971671123...

sleepingsoul 5y ago
Hi there, Well, that's a tricky question to answer! :) At the moment we use DOIs to link papers / citations, and get our information on DOIs from crossref (https://www.crossref.org/ https://www.crossref.org/). So every DOI there is also in our system (and any citation coming from a source without a DOI currently won't be picked up). From crossref we also have metadata on which publications a given paper references, so we can always show information on how many publications cite a given paper ("traditional citations"). As for our database of Smart Citations (the extracted in-text citation statements) -- the answer is that it depends on our ability to access full-text articles to actually do the citation statement extraction. We're constantly growing in this area through new indexing agreements with publishers and so on. To your specific question about that DOI, here is the corresponding scite report for that paper: https://scite.ai/reports/a-unified-framework-for-coupling-dZAL2j https://scite.ai/reports/a-unified-framework-for-coupling-dZ... I see that we identified 371 distinct citing publications (and extracted 374 in-text citation statements from those publications). Can you let me know where you saw it say "no citations"? That sounds like a bug... I'll take a look. You can email me here: ashish@scite.ai - Ashish
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  Thanks! Weird, I searched for that DOI moments before and it showed this result: "This publication either has no citations yet, or we are still processing them" Let me look into others
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  I think you have an issue in your UI, or I don't understand how it's supposed to be used When I have the results from an article in my screen and use the top search to find another, it only updates the upper part of the page with the paper title, not the stats and summary below it I had searched for an article before that had no citations. That's why I continued to see "no citations" when I searched for the DOI I shared...
  - sleepingsoul 5y ago
    Hi, Thanks for that description, I managed to reproduce this and it is our fault not yours. You are using it correctly. We'll get it fixed ASAP! EDIT: Fixed now :)

uniqueuid 5y ago

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I agree that those use cases are definitely valid. And I would also say that research is a technologically underdeveloped space. So any innovation here is great and will definitely help people! The only worry I have (from past experience) is that easy tools have a differential impact: That they facilitate bad research more than they facilitate sound research. My perception as a scientist is that we primarily need to address actively harmful science (as in: spurious results, p-hacking). Fostering more science, on the other hand, is definitely a second or even third priority.

sleepingsoul 5y ago
Yep, I agree. I would like to point out though that one of our aims with this is to buffer against that bad research you mention. Along with our extraction of citation statements, we have a deep learning model that classifies each statement as "supporting", "contrasting", or "mentioning" of the claims made in the original paper. Indeed there is a lot of nuance here, and we've tried to address this in a number of ways (including a manual flag process for review where someone believes it is incorrectly labeled), and we're constantly improving in this area. In general we would expect that research that is not sound will receive more contrasting citations rather than supporting citations because their findings won't be as well supported by future research. I should say explicitly that a "contrasting" citation is not a bad thing per se, especially given the nature of scientific discovery. But a study that was published through p-hacking whose findings are not reproducible should be easier to discern through subsequent contrasting citations. In today's world, all we might know is that it was cited a bunch, with the nuance buried underneath. - Ashish